VMworld Europe 2017 – Day 1

Tuesday was the official day 1 which kicked off with the key note that even included a VR demo with Pat Gelsinger throwing a live VM around the cluster and into a AWS cloud using VMware Cloud on AWS. This actually worked well and was something different and whats cool is the tech demo’d came out of a previous hackathon. In terms of announcements there wasnt a great deal of new announcements as the US VMworld was only a week before. There was announcements for new versions of VMware Integrated Containers and VMware Integrated OpenStack. Plus announcements of the new HCX technologies and IBM Cloud availability for Europe.

Before I could jump into sessions I first had my own session to do, I was honoured to be accepted for a vBrownBag session and was selected early on. For me it was a good experience to present at a major event and come out of my comfort zone and luckily it was well attended. The session was my take on Horizon and NSX – Better Together.

Now it was time to get involved in the general sessions. I wanted to stay away from the main track and look at tech that was new to me and the first session was that – Introduction to NSX-T Architecture.

The vision from the NSX team is really exciting and can be the real driver for VMware over the next few years. The vision is to secure infrastructure no matter what the end point is either on-premises VMware or public cloud such as Azure or AWS. Im really looking forward to working with this over the next few years and hope they get this right,

The session went over the architecture and involved a demo.

Next up was some troubleshooting steps and again from a live demo environment.

We went over the supported ecosystem

It finished with a nice bonus covering NSX for container networking and a brief chat on NSX Cloud with AWS.

Next session I grabbed was – VMware Cloud on AWS: Storage Deep Dive.

We now know vSAN will be used for VMware on AWS but this session dived into that further by covering how each host is configured in terms of hardware and vSAN disk groups, remember this is a bare metal service using AWS.

It then went on to show how the cluster will be configured, critically it went over the limitations such as no dedupe and compression and no stretch cluster will be support as things stand at the minute.

Interestingly as well it showed the multiple vSAN datastore support used to separate management.

Networking for vSAN was then covered and showed the segregation of workloads.

Finally it showed what is currently being developed – note any details in these slides can change and may not be in the main release. First up was vSAN streched cluster using AWS multiple AZs. One of the main draw backs currently with VMC on AWS for me is the ability to use multiple AZs but its good to know they are working on it.

DR services were brought up, for me DR is a big use case for VMC on AWS so again good to know they are working on it.

I finished the day off by doing a Hands on Lab which was expert led meaning you can ask an assigned VMware SE about the product. I dont normally do the HOLs at VMworld as I do them at home but this was one of the labs that may not be made public and was covering NSX Cloud on AWS.

I ran through the guided lab which gets you to secure a WordPress application running in AWS as EC2, it covered the deployment of NSX Cloud something I was told wont be available with the service VMware will be doing the deployment so it was cool to see what is involved. This lab then deployed the agents on EC2 and applied the policies using AWS specific tags, now you might think why would you want to do this as I can do this anyway in AWS, and you would be right but then think this could be done in any cloud but the security policies can be managed all though NSX.

Day 1 for me was great and I got to see a lot of new tech which is what i wanted and there was still a lot I missed out on due to scheduling so I will be looking to catch up online over the coming days,